Wednesday Linkstorm
Happy belated to Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and Fyodor Dostoyevsky who had birthdays on November 11. And so it goes. Celebrate by listening to this great Mountain Goats song that name checks Raskolnikov.Ready to have your mind blown? T.S. Eliot's wife died yesterday. T.S. Eliot was born in 1888. Yo, Valerie Eliot, what was it like to be married to Thomas Stearns Eliot, a famous poet who was born in the 1800s? Valerie Eliot: Wack as hell, thanks for asking. RIP Val!In other sadness news, poet Jack Gilbert has died. Read his Paris Review Art of Poetry Interview here.Hey, it's National Novel Writing Month, a thing I think is kind of silly.So I guess Philip Roth retired from writing? I'm always kind of wary when people make these kind of pronouncements. It's like, okayyyy Amanda Bynes, sure you're retiring. But this (from The New Yorker) is sort of heartbreaking: “When I finished, I decided to reread all of my books beginning with the last, ”˜Nemesis.' I wanted to see if I had wasted my time writing. And I thought it was more or less a success. At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said, ”˜I did the best I could with what I had.' It's exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had.” The Millions has ten lessons to be learned from his career.The nondenominational holiday season is almost upon us. Don't worry though, I got your back. If you're ignoring your bookish girlfriend's very explicit requests for a replica bust of Mark Twain [ed note: a bargain at only $95!], you should definitely go with a subscription to this Melville House thing where they send you two novellas a month. Look how neat they are! Want them all (except the Proust, obviously).A 97-year-old human wrote a book. And it is, of all things, "a comedic yarn using letters, text messages, memos, Variety articles, e-mails and Skype transcripts." Ours is a world of wonder.How crazy is this Petraeus thing? Did you read about how John R. Allen exchanged 20,000 - 30,000 pages of email with Patraeus' mistress over the course of two years? That is A LOT of emails. Wonder what the subject line was. Probably just "hey". Anyway, here's the Times Book Review's angle: Paula Broadwell as the bad biographer.